Tuesday, 26 November 2013

The other day, as I was dropping off my son at school, I was
approached by another mom, who asked for my business card and said she was thinking about putting her 6-year-old daughter in piano lessons.She told me that she’d been reading a lot in
the news about how studying music was good for brain development.

I’ve noticed this too:a flurry of news articles in the last few weeks extolling the benefits
of musical training for children’s brains.Music training altering the brain isn’t really news, but here's what is: several recent research
studies show that a relatively short period of musical training early in life
can have long-lasting effects on the brain.

Nina Kraus’ lab at Northwestern University has published a stack of papers showing that musical training alters the way the brain
processes sound.One of the ways they
study auditory processing is by looking at the electrical responses of the
brainstem in response to sounds such as speech.One particular type of sound in speech that can be difficult to process
is the transition between consonants and vowels.Because this transition happens so quickly, it can be hard to tell apart the sound "da" from the sound "ba", for example. A fast brainstem response to consonant-vowel
transitions indicates that this type of auditory input is well-processed, and
this in turn leads to enhanced language abilities.Kraus’ lab has shown in the past that
musicians’ brains have faster responses to these types of transitions than the
brains of non-musicians.

A new study from Kraus’ lab, published this month in the
Journal of Neuroscience, compares brainstem responses to consonant-vowel
transitions in older adults who either had no musical training, a small amount
of musical training (1-3 years) as a child, or a moderate amount of musical training
(4-14 years) as a child.Note that all
of the musical training had occurred while the subjects were children, and so it
had been roughly 50 years since these people had had music lessons.

Despite the fact that it had been so long since musical training ended,
there were noticeable differences in the responses to consonant-vowel
transitions in the brains of the three different groups.The fastest responses were from the people
with the most musical training, while the people with no musical training had
the slowest responses.

From White-Schwoch et al. (2013).Group average brainstem responses to the
sound “da”.The blue lines (fastest response)
are the subjects with moderate musical training, orange is little musical
training, and grey lines are the responses from people with no musical
training.

This study shows that the effects of musical training can
persist long after the musical training has stopped.Why would this be?We tend to think of our brain capabilities in
a “use it or lose it” fashion – for example, if you don’t play the piano for 50
years, you’re probably not going to be able to play it very well.But in this case, what the musical training
did was to alter the way the brain processes sound, and since processing sound
is something that we do in everyday life, the enhanced neural responses to
sound continued to be used after the end of musical training.The authors of this study suggest that early
musical training primes the brain’s auditory system for further plasticity in
response to sound, setting the stage for future auditory effects on the brain.

Another study, presented at the recent annual meeting of the
Society for Neuroscience, showed that people who had musical training that started
before the age of seven had thicker gray matter in certain areas of the brain than
those who started musical training later.This research, authored by Yunxin Wang at Beijing Normal University,
indicates that starting lessons before the age of seven is more likely to lead to long-lasting brain changes, something that has been suggested by previous research.What is slightly different about Wang’s study, though, is that the
subjects were not all currently musicians; some had had only a small amount of
musical training in childhood and not continued with lessons.Nevertheless, that early musical training
seems to have left an impression in their brains.Whether the differences in brain anatomy lead
to any change in brain function is not yet known, but this type of result
certainly suggests that starting music lessons earlier is more likely to lead
to long-lasting neurological benefits.

References

Wang, Y., Xei, L., Zhu, B., Liu, Q., and Dong, Q. (2013). It matters
when you start: The age of onset of music training predicts brain anatomy. Program No. 765.07, Neuroscience 2013
Abstracts, San Diego, CA: Society for Neuroscience, Online.

Scientific studies have shown that there are distinct
differences in the brains of musicians compared to non-musicians. For example, they have larger auditory cortices, larger
cerebellums, and greater connections between the two sides of the brain via the
corpus callosum.Current research is
trying to figure out whether musician’s brains became that way because of all
the musical training, or whether those people became musicians because they
were genetically predisposed to having brains like that.The evidence, thoroughly reviewed by Barrett
et al., weighs heavily in support of the idea that musical training does alter
the brain.

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t individual
differences in brains and their musical abilities, and specifically in their
ability to learn musical skills.This
topic is reviewed by Zatorre, pointing to studies on both speech and music in
which subjects can be classified into groups of slow learners or fast learners.He highlights in particular his own study of micro-interval
discrimination in which learning rate was related to the brain’s discriminatory
responses before training.His results
indicate that certain pre-existing brain capabilities led to faster learning. It’s
not clear (nor does Zatorre make this case) that the differences in learning
were based on genetic predisposition rather than environmental factors, but
there are obviously individual differences between people, and we know that
genetic variability exists. We are all different, after all.

There’s an ongoing and never-ending debate about whether
success as a musician (or in any other art or skill) is due to innate aptitude
(what some people might call natural talent), or whether it is due to working
hard and having access to the right teachers and opportunities.It’s the old nature-vs-nurture question, and
while everyone agrees that both factors play a role, there is much to
learn about what role each factor plays.

It seems that for a long time people have leaned strongly towards
the idea that talent is inborn:either
you are a musical person or not.When I
was a teenager, people used to say to me, quite often, how lucky I was to be so musically talented.And I
remember thinking that these people were wrong:I was just lucky that I enjoyed playing music so much that I was happy
to practice a lot.I fairly recently had
a woman ask me if I would listen to her child fool around on the piano, to see
if I thought the girl had enough talent that it was worthwhile pursuing music
lessons.My response was that of course
she should have piano lessons; her natural musical ability shouldn’t really
have any bearing on that decision.But many
people think musical talent is something you are born with.

There is certainly a grain of truth to this idea.Every music teacher can see that some
students find music lessons much easier than others.These students tend to have certain characteristics
that help them:a good sense of pitch,
good fine motor control, an ability to focus their attention, and a willingness
to self-correct.Every person is
different, so certainly some people begin music lessons with a head-start.They may not have had any musical training,
but they have already some of the skills that are useful for studying
music.But does that mean they are
genetically more musically talented?Not
necessarily.These things that they’re
good at (pitch, motor control) could be there because of other experiences they
have had in life.

On the other hand, I’d bet that every music teacher could
also tell you about students who seemed musical but didn’t get far with their
lessons because they didn’t practice regularly.And there are definitely students who start off with seemingly mediocre
abilities, but who work hard and learn to play well. For the last few years I've been teaching a young boy who has always
been an inconsistent practicer, just managing to keep up with his class. However,
this year he is on a kick of seeing how many days in a row he can
practice.He’s up to almost 300 days of
practice, and the difference in his playing is remarkable.It’s an excellent example that, no matter what
your predisposition, if you put in the hours at your instrument, your playing will
improve. The experience of playing music changes your musical brain.

Every student is different, and comes to music lessons with
their own set of skills, their own capacity for learning, and their own personality.
Their brains are all different at the start of their musical training, and they
will each develop in different ways. At the same time, every student has the
capability to learn well with enough effort.The job of the music teacher is to be aware of those individual
differences so that she can try to strengthen the students’ weak points, and
also find ways to motivate the students so that they are willing to put in the
daily practice required to improve. I find that the children who seem to have more
musical “ability” at the beginning of lessons tend to improve more quickly.It’s hard to know if this is because they
have a genetic advantage, or if they simply are more motivated to practice
because they find music easier to start with.There’s such an interaction between predisposition and experience that
it is extremely difficult to untangle them.Aptitude and hard work are intrinsically linked by motivation.This is part of what makes nature and nurture
inseparable in the debate about where talent comes from.

About Me

Tara Gaertner is a neuroscientist, music educator, writer and speaker. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Music from McGill University and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience from the University of Texas, Houston. She has taught piano, flute, and music theory since 1988 and currently teaches the Music for Young Children program as well as private piano and flute lessons. She is an Adjunct Professor at the University of British Columbia, lecturing on Neuroscience in the department of Occupational Science and Occupational Therapy.